Pollard passed classified information about enemy states to the Israeli government during the 1980s, and has been in jail serving a life sentence for espionage since 1985.

In a two-minute video, recorded on
Monday at a conference in Manhattan in which Woolsey took part, Woolsey said:
“If you look at other allies of the United States, such as South Korea and the
Philippines, where we have caught spies, the sentence that they had has been
light, not like Pollard’s; it’s been about six or seven years. What I said in The
Wall Street Journal essentially was that if anybody is hung up over the fact
that he’s an American Jew or that he’s Israeli, just pretend that he’s a South
Korean and set him free.”

In response to a question from the cameraman
about what may or may not have happened during the administration of former US
president Bill Clinton, under whom Woolsey was CIA director, he said, “At the
beginning… they asked us all – top-level people who dealt with defense and
foreign policy, including me – and I opposed clemency at that point. He’d been
in prison about seven or eight years, and I went through the material that he
took, and it is very serious, it was very sensitive. So I did not support
clemency that time around. But the next time it came up, several years later, I
was asked what I thought, and what I said is essentially what I’ve said ever
since.”

When asked what he would tell current US President Barack Obama,
Woolsey said “I would say [to President Obama] what I said in The Wall Street
Journal: If you’re hung up on this for any reason, pretend Pollard is a South
Korean or Filipino-American or an ally from someplace else, and free him. He’s
been in prison a long time now, and the only people who are in prison that long
are people like [convicted CIA spy Aldrich] Ames and [convicted FBI spy Robert]
Hanssen who got people killed, and Pollard didn’t do that.”

The Wall
Street Journal piece to which Woolsey was referring was a letter to the editor
Woolsey wrote that was published on July 4, 2012, in which he called for
Pollard to be released. Woolsey wrote the letter in response to an opinion piece
by Martin Peretz, the publisher of the New Republic, in which Peretz criticized
top US officials for calling for Pollard’s release.